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Tuesday, January 14, 2014

`Almost Forgotten Like an Aztec Temple'

The
last of Ford Madox Ford’s many books, The
March of Literature (1938), is one of those smorgasbord volumes, consumed
once cover to cover like a sumptuous meal and nibbled at for the rest of one’s
reading life. In his introduction, Ford describes it as “the book of an old man
mad about writing—in the sense that Hokusai called himself an old man mad about
painting.” He encourages readers “to taste the pleasure that comes from always
more and more reading.” What he says of Dr. Johnson’s Lives of the English Poets -- “a mountain of good reading; his vast
common sense outweighs with its pronouncements any harm his more prejudicial
moods and wrong-headednesses may in their day have caused” – applies with comparable
justice to Ford’s eccentric, 800-page digression.

For
instance, Ford detects in Johnson’s style an improvement between the
publication of The History of Rasselas,
Prince of Abissinia in 1759 and the Lives
(1779-81). He attributes the refinement to the annual pension of £300 Johnson
was granted by King George III in 1762. The money moved him to complete his
long-delayed edition of Shakespeare, published in 1765. Ford, always an advocate
for the lives of working writers, continues:

“The
secret of this great change is a simple one. For ten years after receiving his
pension Johnson led a life of complete literary idleness and passed his time
almost solely in conversation. He made of conversation a fine art for its
vigour, its terseness, its clarity, the brilliance of its similes, its humanity,
its intolerance, its knowledge of the facts of man, its humaneness.”

Ford
is wrong here, but interestingly, usefully wrong. Johnson was hardly idle,
though during the period identified by Ford he produced only one work we judge
major, A Journey to the Western Islands
of Scotland (1775). He completed, in addition to the Shakespeare project, a
number of political pamphlets, including “The Patriot” (1774) and “Taxation NoTyranny” (1775), finished work on the fourth edition of his Dictionary (1773), and helped assemble
the first collected edition of his works (1774). As to conversation, let’s
remember he met Boswell, who always encouraged his talk, in 1763, and The Club
was organized in 1764, with Johnson, Burke, Boswell, Gibbon, Garrick, Sheridan
and Adam Smith among its charter members. By the time the London booksellers
approached Johnson in 1771 with a proposal to write prefaces to a collection of
poets from Cowley onwards, Ford says, “he had perfected a style in the best of
all schools.” At this point, Ford briefly leaves Johnson behind:

“The
province and duty of all writers of the imagination is the expression of facts
or thoughts with all the exactitude open to them. For them the proper study of
the language they shall employ will be found only secondarily in books and
first and last in the vernacular of their day.”

Here
I part company with Ford. He couldn’t have known how poorly many people speak
today, and the pride they take in being inarticulate, or how threadbare our
vernacular has become. His next sentence qualifies his point somewhat: “This
will be the language and vocabulary of a society made up of reasonably
communicative and, if possible, reasonably thoughtful individuals.”

Ford’s
final paragraph on Johnson is a moving tribute to a man with whom he must have
felt substantial literary kinship (“an old man mad about writing”):

“But
ten years’ rest and the getting into his head of a conversational rhythm and a
vocabulary comprehensible to most of the cultivated men of his day had on
Johnson the effect of evolving a style that was at once sufficiently learned to
save his face and sufficiently actual to let us read his Lives of the Poets with pleasure even in these anti-Latinistic
days. It is a work that, had there been no Boswell, must have been a resounding
monument to this great man. As it is, it stands almost forgotten like an Aztec
temple lost in South American [sic] undergrowths.
It is a great pity.”